Stanford Security Seminar

Hawk: The Blockchain Model of Cryptography and Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts

Elaine Shi

Abstract:

Existing blockchain-based cryptocurrencies store all financial transactions in the clear on the blockchain. This compromises the privacy of financial transactions, which is essential in numerous applications.

Hawk (http://www.oblivm.com/hawk/) is a blockchain-based smart contract system that stores encrypted transactions on the blockchain, and relies on cryptography to retain the security of the cryptocurrency.

I will talk about the design of Hawk. Moreover, I will also describe how to formally model and reason about protocols in the blockchain model.